Much of the album is like 1980 revisited and updated. [Jan 2003, p.115]

Running the gamut from freakbeat to post-Sabbath blues rock to dark prog invention. [Sep 2024, p.50]

With Calexico's sensitive muting of colour, Beam is clearly thriving throughout. [Nov 2005, p.112]

What Negative Capability has for you at its best is just this kind of upending of expectations. [Dec 2018, p.16]

Band Of Horses specialise in melodic melancholy with a sheen of hope. [May 2006, p.107]

Sounding like a highly-evolved amalgam of their entire output--with added surprises--the beauty of this 12th album lies in its head-spinning diversity. [Oct 2006, p.134]

It lacks that album's [To Pimp A Butterfly] audacious musicality, instead cleaving toward sleekly produced rap that platforms Lamar's fierce but graceful lyricism. [Feb 2025, p.36]

Other Lives are clearly kindred spirits of The National, but there's not a single clunky or derivative note here. [Sep 2011, p.93]

This cosmic suite evokes a steamy union between Vangelis and Santana, and is Lindstrom's strongest work by far. [Oct 2008, p.96]

Worth the price alone is the inclusion of their peerless ’97 Nurse With Wound collaboration “Simple Headphone Mind”/“Trippin’ With The Birds”, half an hour of sublime Neu!-sozzled psych as Steven Stapleton caresses the ’lab’s “Long Hair Of Death”. [Oct 2022, p.48]

This follow-up finds them flitting dynamically from royal Trux-ish fuzz blues to incantatory pieces like 'Shells,' that cross "Experimental Jet Set"-era Youth with Nico. [Jun 2009, p.92]

His most expansive statement to date, a swaggering collage of blues, boogie, hip-hop and fuzzy rock riffs on which - unlike with, say, Joe Bonamassa - the songs are never subjugated to grandstanding guitar pyrotechinics. [Apr 2024, p.31]

The Broken Wave, her debut album, is refreshing folk-pop bursting with beautiful melodies and a production carefully designed to emphasise her memorably pristine vocals. [Feb 2011, p.95]

A racket, but a charismatic one. [Jun 2014, p.72]

The Hypnogogue is like every other Church album, and nothing quite like any of them; both statements are intended as compliments. [Apr 2023, p.26]

This addictive slab of retro rock is the work of gifted singer/guitarist Tash Neal and deft drummer.singer Chris St Hilaire, who've loaded the 13 tracks here with hooks. [Sep 2015, p.77]

Finger-poppin' fantastic. [Jul 2023, p.36]

Musically at least, [Jacksonville] confirms Adams' restoration to rude health. [Oct 2005, p.106]

By turns poppy, cerebral and conceptually cute. [Jun 2006, p.106]

His first solo outing has enabled Ben Gibbard to try on new stylistic contexts as if they were outfits. [Dec 2012, p.71]

Deconstructing socio-cultural norms rarely sounds like so much fun. [Feb 2017, p.24]

Be Strong is warm and easy comfort food for recessionary midlife ravers. [Feb 2012, p.90]

She reinvents the standards songbook in her image, using her deep, husky, Malboro-burnished voice to breathe life intro hackneyed old showtunes. [July 2008, p.115]

The second full-length album is richly textured and exceedingly complex in its arrangements. [Apr 2012, p.75]

It's the hushed, soul-searching moments--especially the lovelorn "Alone In Arizona" and the gorgeous, universal ballad "A Little Help"--that resonate most. [Jun 2016, p.71]

The partners [Peyroux and producer Larry Klein] and arranger Vince Mendoza breathe new life into iconic songs. [May 2013, p.75]

Its heady and timeless distillation of dub gospel, disco excursions, molten psych rock and soulful swagger sounds more like back to the future. [Jul 2025, p.37]

This second is a well-crafted collection that finds McClure pondering his place in a rotten world. [Aug 2009, p.102]

The Bride is her most accomplished realisation of her wandering mind yet. [Aug 2016, p.65]

There are still big choruses here. But they now layer things deftly. [Jun 2010, p.86]

Lyrically, The Murder Capital are less direct than Idles and Fontaines, but musically they're more expansive, bringing a brooding brain-twisting gothic feel. [Sep 2019, p.30]

A lush song suite reflective of the grandeur of their native New Zealand's landscapes. [Sep 2018, p.29]

If there is pure genius in this last set of remasters, it is in how Jimmy Page has contrived to turn Coda from a desultory selection of offcuts into an essential purchase. [Sep 2015, p.93]

No song here exceeds the five-minute mark, and each one feels finely honed, melodically generous, and designed to penetrate your consciousness. [Sep 2014, p.66]

The sparer treatments on How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow make for something more enthralling, partially because of how much the largely piano-and-vocal arrangements evoke the crystalline beauty of Brun's early albums. [Jan 2021, p.23]

There are star turns from figures like the veteran tenor saxophonist Ari Brown. But this is a collective, community affair - never more so than on "Stigmergy", which sees multiple instruments feeding into a single, glowing master melody. [Jul 2023, p.30]

The result is a high;y accomplished and warmly uplifting country-soul album that easily holds its own amid both musicians' back catalogues. [Oct 2012, p.73]

It's a genius pop album by a genius pop singer-songwriter. [Nov 2013, p.70]

Doyle shines as a singer and lyricist. [Dec 2014, p.78]

With everything slathered liberally in reverb, Ester is wrong in all the right ways. [Feb 2012, p.90]

The results is an album that's braver, weirder and richer than most of his more sensible and brand-conscious peers could ever manage. [Jun 2019, p.18]

On Holy Spring he expands the minimalist palette of his debut Distant Early Warning. [Jun 2019, p.34]

It's rich, beguiling stuff. [Mar 2009, p.78]

Reinterpreting these sample-and-synth-laden originals for guitar is quite an achievement, and the results are certainly fascinating. [Feb 2011, p.82]

This is space-age folk music from an elaborate sound sculptor. [Jul 2013, p.75]

A beautiful, rather brave album, and by far her best. [Jul 2013, p.83]

Regular frontwoman Ninja remains a ferocious force of nature on several tracks. ... Consistently great, routinely underrated. [Mar 2023, p.26]

Exhausting but rewarding. [Oct 2018, p.26]

Electric glitches and intriguing lyrics add to a quietly seductive package. [Nov 2025, p.27]

The rich jangles of this fifth album [is] a notable career high. [Sep 2015, p.71]

A scene of glorious, twilit devastation. [Oct 2012, p.75]

There's a loose lyrical theme of branding and consumer culture inspiring the maverick meta-pop of "Personal Shopper." ... The Sparks-y spriteliness of "Follower" also stands out, thanks to beautifully falsetto-iced vocal hooks, which further grace the gorgeously forlorn synth-pop of "King Ghost." [Feb 2021, p.37]

Thirty years later, the heaviness of these songs has intensified rather than abated. [Dec 2017, p.40][Album: 9/10, Extras: 7/10]

The best tracks ooze a kind of drowsy melancholy. [Feb 2012, p.86]

The 14th installment of influential Cologne label Kompakt's superlative Pop Ambient series provides plenty of surprises. [Feb 2014, p.83]

Occasional throwaway aside, there are some real gnarled beauties on display here. [Mar 2014, p.80]

A deliciously bubbling cauldron seasoned with ladles of Scott Walker melodrama and a generously pinch of Bowie-inspired balladry. [May 2025, p.33]

Wonderfully eclectic and strangely uplifting. [Aug 2021, p.31]

It's an eclectic yet assured record that sounds like someone taking stock but using that solid foundation as a springboard to leap forward musically. [Aug 2025, p.31]

As powerfully evocative as a French arthouse flick. [Sep 2002, p.116]

A hypnotic dream-map of astral drift and spac-age chamber music, textured jazztronica and technoid pulse. [Dec 2001, p.106]

He also plays an agreeably skronky, Jeff-Beck-style electric on several tracks, but it's when unplugged that Lage is at his most extraordinary. [Apr 2024, p.38]

He uses digital means to deepen, layer, smear, distend and otherwise tweak the emotive piano figures that remain discernable. ... As is often the case for Tiersen's music, the effect is mesmerising. [Oct 2021, p.35]

Rolling Blackouts is as invigorating as their debut. [Feb 2011, p.87]

They appropriate Thin Lizzy's strutting grooves and harmonised guitars on "Dream City" and Psychic Lighting," while other tracks gleefullly work in a careening analog synth as if it had just been invented. [Jun 2010, p.86]

The playing is admirably under stated throughout, and the highlights numerous. [Sep 2025, p.29]

That it all hangs together so seamlessly is testament to his inherent charm. There's a warmth and looseness to these songs that feels deeply convivial. [Oct 2025, p.28]

Johns suggesting a hunger for discovery still resides in us all, and his beautifully considered songs make for an emotive sat-nav. [Jul 2014, p.70]

No shortage of noise-rock credentials. But there's also a real sense of groove: from the opener "A Star IS Born", all fuzzed-out Psych rock, both hypnotic and raw, there's a pleasing pulse to much of their debut. [Nov 2025, p35]

If this is indeed Crow's last recording, as she's speculated, this cavalcade of hotwired connections is a splendid way to cap off her career. [Oct 2019, p.27]

Rich and strange. [Nov 2017, p.30]

Once you've digested the background information, tracks that seem slightly twee and aloof spring into focus. [Sep 2005, p.100]

Finds Muller reviving a lush disco spirit he once discretely discarded. [Jul 2005, p.92]

"Wolves Change Rivers" betrays his love for Erik Satie, but "For My Mother" [is] reassuring affection is unquestionably his own. [Jan 2019, p.21]

As you'd expect, his 12th album sounds wonderful. [Nov 2011, p.86]

An album that finds wildness in unexpected places. [Feb 2017, p.16]

The band strike a neat balance between chunky Pavement guitar scrawl and sombre orchestrals. [Dec 2011, p.89]

It's a decidedly sparser backdrop for his erudite, torch-like confessionals. [Dec 2012, p.76]

Reggae Film Star is a luminous beauty. [Aug 2022, p.29]

She's far bolder, singing in a strange, little girl's voice over a solitary Chet Baker-style trumpet or chanting mantra-like over a bubbling African rhythm. [May 2008, p.87]

There's a similar vibe here [to the soundtrack they created for BBC drama Gallows Pole] on tracks such as "raised By Hills" and "Tripping In The Graveyard", although elsewhere the psych weirdness is as rampantly eclectic as ever. [Nov 2023, p.29]

This is their sixth album and inevitably some jazzy ostentation has crept in, but generally there's a warm, graceful fluidity to Skit I Allt's billowing jams that remains uniquely beguiling. [Oct 2010, p.94]

Throughout Azel, the mix of the two genres allows for an even greater sense of uplift and collectivism in a music that always carried the communal at its core. [May 2016, p.72]

Some may find it too clean, but it's still thunderously good. [May 2013, p.75]

The beautiful, feathery songwriting featured on Boson-based Casy Dienel's previous album as White Hinterland has had a steroidal pumping. [May 2014, p.83]

William and Jim Reid remain as defiantly out of time as ever. [Mar 2024, p.29]

This sequel similarly mixes hard country and mountain music, memorably on Harlan Howard's "Busted" and a plaintive "Half Over You." [Feb 2010, p.93]

Songs are steeped in creeping '90s guitar with ear-catching lyrics, plus a sense of vibrancy that comes from the fact Crutchfield really does have something to say. [Aug 2017, p.38

This Brooklyn-based trio make hedonistic dance-pop with brainy-sexy lyrics informed by gender politics, third-wave feminism and Queer Theory. [Feb 2011, p.90]

The guitar-loving chums churn out suitably entertaining, sludgy fare, a bit like a Neanderthal, fuzzier Fuzz with occasional electronics. [Aug 2016, p.76]

Everything they do is infused with an undeniable, albeit sometimes unfathomable, psychedelic spirit. [Mar 2004, p.92]

Producer Mike Mogis [gives] these delicate songs a sheen that was lacking on their 2001 debut. [Jul 2003, p.114]

The album keeps faith with The Jayhawks' trademark expansive Americana. [Oct 2018, p.29]

Pete Bernahrd's songs speak of humanity facing insanity in many forms. [Oct 2018, p.27]

This record is a graceful, seemingly intuitive unfolding into various emotional and/or imagined physical landscapes. [May 2023, p.29]

If there's any justice, the stadiums of tomorrow await them. [Apr 2006, p.105]

An album that is clearly having a blast while showing blatant disregard for genre convention. [May 2026, p.37]

On I Abused Animals, Leigh works with stretched song forms--the result is remarkable. [Jan 2016, p.77]